o. Time and again the Navy responded to
this charge, echoing Secretary Forrestal's contention that the Navy
had no racial quotas and that all restrictions on the employment of
black sailors had been lifted. As if suggesting that all racial
distinctions had been abandoned, personnel officials discontinued
publishing racial statistics and abolished the Special Programs
Unit.[9-10] Cynics might have ascribed other motives for these
decisions, but the civil rights forces apparently never bothered. For
the most part they left the Navy's apologists to struggle with the
increasingly difficult task of explaining why the placement of Negroes
deviated so markedly from assignment for whites.

[Footnote 9-10: The BuPers Progress Report (Pers
215), the major statistical publication of the
department, terminated its statistical breakdown by
race in March 1946. The Navy's racial affairs
office was closed in June 1946. See BuPers,
"Narrative of Bureau of Naval Personnel, 1
September 1945 to 1 October 1946" (hereafter
"BuPers Narrative"), 1:73.]

The Navy's difficulty in this regard stemmed from the fact that the
demobilization program under which it geared down from a 3.4
million-man service to a peacetime force of less than half a million
was quite straightforward and simple. Consequently, the latest state
of the Negro in the Navy was readily apparent to the black serviceman
and to the public. The key to service in the postwar Navy was
acceptance into the Regular Navy. The wartime Navy had been composed
overwhelmingly of reservists and inductees, and shortly after V-J day
the Navy announced plans for the orderly separation of all reservists
by September 1946. In April 1946 it discontinued volunteer enlistment
in the Naval Reserve for immediate active duty, and in May it (p. 238)
issued its last call for draftees through Selective Service.[9-11]

[Footnote 9-11: Ibid., p. 143; Selective Service
System, _Special Groups_ (Monograph 10), 2:200.
Between September 1945 and May 1946 the Navy
drafted 20,062 men, including 3,394 Negroes.]

At the same time the Bureau of Naval Personnel launched a vigorous
program to induce reservists to switch to the Regular Navy. In October
1945 it opened all petty officer rat